Letters between Marie Antoinette and her mother, the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, document life at the French court and Marie's personal concerns

The untold story of Marie-Antoinette's perfumer, Jean-Louis Fargeon. Montpellier, 1748: Jean-Louis Fargeon is born into a family of perfumers and soon becomes apprentice to his father's modest perfumery. But he dreams of the glittering court of Versailles and of becoming perfumer to the young queen, Marie Antoinette. His ambition carried him to Paris where his boutique became one of the most elegant and well-patronised in France. Concocting sumptuous perfumes and pomades for most of the French nobility, Fargeon eventually caught the attention of the queen. After meeting Marie Antoinette in the Trianon Palace, he began creating lavish bespoke scents that perfectly reflected her moods and personality. He served as her personal and exclusive perfumer for fourteen years until 1789 when the darkness of Revolution swept across France, its wrath aimed at the extravagance of a now hated queen. Fargeon, a lifelong supporter of the Republican cause but a purveyor to the court, was in a dangerous position. Yet he remained fiercely loyal to Marie Antoinette, beyond her desperate flight to Varennes, her execution and even through his own imprisonment and trial...

In this dazzling new vision of the ever-fascinating queen, a dynamic young historian reveals how Marie Antoinette's bold attempts to reshape royal fashion changed the future of France Marie Antoinette has always stood as an icon of supreme style, but surprisingly none of her biographers have paid sustained attention to her clothes. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber shows how Marie Antoinette developed her reputation for fashionable excess, and explains through lively, illuminating new research the political controversies that her clothing provoked. Weber surveys Marie Antoinette's "Revolution in Dress," covering each phase of the queen's tumultuous life, beginning with the young girl, struggling to survive Versailles's rigid traditions of royal glamour (twelve-foot-wide hoopskirts, whalebone corsets that crushed her organs). As queen, Marie Antoinette used stunning, often extreme costumes to project an image of power and wage war against her enemies. Gradually, however, she began to lose her hold on the French when she started to adopt "unqueenly" outfits (the provocative chemise) that, surprisingly, would be adopted by the revolutionaries who executed her. Weber's queen is sublime, human, and surprising: a sometimes courageous monarch unwilling to allow others to determine her destiny. The paradox of her tragic story, according to Weber, is that fashion—the vehicle she used to secure her triumphs—was also the means of her undoing. Weber's book is not only a stylish and original addition to Marie Antoinette scholarship, but also a moving, revelatory reinterpretation of one of history's most controversial figures.

Delve deeper into the world of the BBC hit drama series Versailles, and discover the real Marie-Antoinette in this ground-breaking study of her secret love affair with the Swedish diplomat Count Axel von Fersen. For the first time an historian has compiled all the known letters between Swedish count Axel von Fersen and Marie-Antoinette, including six letters never before published. With unprecedented access to French and Swedish archives, Evelyn Farr has proven beyond doubt one of history's greatest romances. Axel von Fersen was Queen Marie-Antoinette's lover and loyal counsellor who gave her political advice from 1785 to the fall of the French monarchy at the time of the French Revolution. He organized the Royal Family's escape from Paris in 1791. Evelyn Farr's revelatory work on the subject also goes some way to proving that Count Fersen was in fact the biological father of Marie Antoinette's two younger children. Farr unveils the logistics and practicalities behind the romance; the use of code and invisible ink, the role of intermediaries, secret seals, double envelopes, codenames and the location of Fersen's clandestine lodgings at Versailles. I Love You Madly is a meticulously researched and enjoyable study of a forbidden love at a time of revolution. The letters portray a rebellious and independent queen who risked everything and broke all the rules to love the man who succeeded in conquering her heart.

This “wonderfully gripping biography” digs beneath the famous legend to present a nuanced and revealing portrait of a serious-mined monarch (Allan Massie, Wall Street Journal). As the last Queen of France before the French Revolution, Marie-Antoinette was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, while today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. But who was she really? In this new account, John Hardman redresses the balance and sheds fresh light on her story. Hardman shows how Marie-Antoinette played a significant but misunderstood role in the crisis of the monarchy. Drawing on new sources, he describes how she refused to prioritize the aggressive foreign policy of her mother, bravely took over the helm from her faltering husband, and, when revolution broke out, worked closely with repentant radicals to give the constitutional monarchy a fighting chance. For the first time, Hardman demonstrates exactly what influence Marie-Antoinette had and when and how she exerted it. Named a 2020 Book of the Year by The Spectator